


Faith in Royalty (or Lack Thereof)

by gingasaur



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Princes & Princesses, Pseudoscience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-19
Updated: 2011-02-19
Packaged: 2017-10-15 18:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/163773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingasaur/pseuds/gingasaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Did he just call one of them a princess? Oh, he’d better be talking about Daniel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Faith in Royalty (or Lack Thereof)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Girl Saves Boy](http://community.livejournal.com/girlsavesboyfic/) ficathon.
> 
> Passing mentions of little details you wouldn't know without seasons 2, 4 and 6 under your belt.
> 
> I'd also be remiss if I failed to link you to [this fly art](http://pearliepoop.tumblr.com/post/2757298978/well-well-someone-owes-me-their-ovaries) of Princess!Sam by [Pearl](http://pearliepoop.tumblr.com/).

Sam awakens to the sweet smell of roses and the sound of somebody shushing her. And nobody shushes Samantha Carter.

It takes her a moment to realize she’s saying something, but the words don’t sound so much like words as they sound like unintelligible rambling, tumbling out of her mouth at a volume that she thinks might be uncharacteristically loud for her. She really wishes she could tell, but that rose smell seems to be permanently lodged up her nostrils and the only thing she can see is the floor, and no matter how many times she blinks, she can’t get it to stop swirling.

“Uh, Jack? I think she’s awake.”

“Yeah, I can _hear_ that, Daniel.” Jack’s voice vibrates right through her stomach, and she feels her whole body bouncing in time with footfalls. She wriggles a little and hands clamp down on her harder in response. It’s when she finally realizes she’s looking at the floor from mid-air that she comes to the conclusion that she’s draped like a sack of potatoes across Jack’s shoulders. He’s carrying her. Why on Earth is he carrying her? It’s not like she doesn’t have two legs of her own.

“Put me down, sir,” she tries to say, but the clear request she thinks in her head and the slurred, muddled mess she ends up hearing in her ears are just _so_ painfully different.

“Major Carter.” Teal’c’s voice is close to her ear, low and soothing. Had his voice always been so soothing? Gosh, it was soothing. “You must remain silent,” he continues. “We are attempting to escape and return to the Stargate.”

Escape? Escape from where? She tries to ask as much, but the only reply she gets is an awfully cranky, “ _Carter_ ,” and she doesn’t think that’s a very good answer.

“I don’t _care_ ,” Jack hisses, “just stop talking so damn _loud._ ” Oh. Did she say that last part out loud?

She lifts her head to get a better look at their surroundings, but a particularly hideous wave of nausea slams into her and she quickly decides to settle for looking at the floor. She hears herself let out a fairly undignified moan as she lowers her head, followed by Jack and Daniel shushing her again.

“Does anybody have any idea where we’re going?” Jack whispers. God, where _are_ they? They have to be off-world, otherwise they wouldn’t be trying to escape from somewhere. Hopefully. She tries to sift through the thick fog that is her memory, but all she comes up with is roses. Roses, roses, that freaking smell of roses. Why is it so _strong?_ It feels like it’s all over her, soaked into her entire body for all eternity, and the charm of the scent is beginning to wear off very quickly.

Stinging bursts of pain suddenly flare up like fire across her skin. “Did I get hit?” she mumbles, hoping her efforts to be quieter actually worked. Nobody makes any agitated noises, so she figures she succeeded.

“Yeah, Sam,” Daniel responds. “You got hit. We all did.”

A vague memory of something the size of a softball smacking her in the face pops into her head. It was black and round, like a giant grenade, except there had been no explosion, only… _roses._ And all hell breaking loose, but that was mostly Colonel O’Neill’s doing. But why? Where in the world are they and what in the world happened?

“And just _where_ do you think you‘re going?”

They screech to a halt and Jack curses under his breath. “Oh, just… going for an evening stroll,” he says through his teeth.

“What are you doing with the princess?” a voice asks, the tone flat and annoyed. It’s male, whoever it is, and there’s a certain grating snootiness in the sound that suggests he holds some kind of authority, and _did he just call one of them a princess?_ Oh, he’d better be talking about Daniel.

She feels Jack tighten his hold on her. “Well, she’d be kind of pissed if we went without her.” Crap. Definitely not talking about Daniel.

“You are trying to leave us,” the voice says. Sam hears a whole slew of shuffling and clicking and Jack takes a step backwards. Weapons.

“Look,” Jack replies loudly, sternly, “we’re taking a pass on this whole prince and princess thing. You let us go, and we won’t kick your asses.”

The voice chuckles. It might sound sinister if it didn’t sound so amused. “You are _staying_ , and you _will_ save our world. The ceremony can’t be completed without you, after all.”

A flurry of deep thumping and poofing noises ring out. Sam doesn’t have much time to wonder why that sounds so familiar, or what kind of weapons sound like fluffy fairy tale magic, before Jack quickly deposits her on the floor. The last thing she remembers before passing out again is the sensation of his body covering hers.

That, and the smell of those damned roses.

\---

She’s just decided, in the confines of her barely conscious mind, that everything had been a crazy little dream after all when her stomach rolls under the weight of a sickly sweet odor and she sits up, tense and sweating and sporting a headache the size of the sun. It _feels_ like the sun, too, and she blinks hard to shoo away the throbbing pain and the relentless blurriness clouding her vision. It accomplishes absolutely nothing, and she presses her palm against her forehead as she slides back down. Her back comes to rest on something hard and cold, and her other arm flops down and hangs over the side of whatever it is that she’s laying on. She’ll look at it in a minute, or whenever the world stops spinning, whichever happens first.

Sam can feel her arms and legs tingling, almost as if the naquadah coursing through her veins is furious that it was beaten down by mere sedatives. But, boy, those were some sedatives. The memories of how she and the rest of the team had gotten into this fine mess finally come back to her in a rush, and she exhales quietly as she resists the urge to lie there and sort through them all. There are more important things to worry about at the moment: she has no idea where she is or if she’s alone, and that doesn’t tend to be the sort of information she likes to go without.

She pushes herself up again, slower this time but wincing anyway. She inhales slowly, each breath coated with that nasty rose scent. When her breathing finally evens out a bit and her stomach stops flipping around like a fish on dry land, she opens her eyes and finds herself staring ahead at black metal bars. A cool breeze makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and she looks behind her to find a red stone wall with a thin, tiny window looking out into the black night. It’s too bad that it’s impossible to fit through, let alone fit an arm through. She turns back to the entrance to her cell, her gaze quickly sweeping over the ceiling and the walls on either side along the way. No cracks, no vents, just solid dark red stone. Fantastic.

She deliberately takes it slow when she finally stands, willing her knees to stop shaking and glancing at the stone bed beside her. She’ll call it a bed for simplicity’s sake, but it’s nothing more than a long stone slab sticking up out of the floor. And they certainly didn’t have the decency to give her a pillow, as the mild crick in her neck is quick to point out. But, then again, this is a cell, so she’s clearly a prisoner. A pillow is probably out of the question.

Her boots click against the stones as she makes her way toward the bars, and it takes her a few more steps than it normally should for her to realize that boots don’t click. When she looks down at herself, her stomach sinks as she suddenly sees what all that princess talk was all about: she’s definitely dressed to fit the part. Instead of BDUs, she finds a little light pink dress, so light that it’s almost white and with heels to match, plastered to her body. It’s smooth as silk and very… form-fitting, to say the least (she’s fairly certain she walked onto this world with two times less cleavage.) The dress begins just below her shoulders and ends in the middle of her thighs, and there’s a long train trailing out behind her. It swishes against the floor every time she moves and makes her feel positively ridiculous, like some sort of bizarre pink peacock. That feeling is only intensified when she reaches up to her hair, shoulders sagging as her fingers graze along the edges of a pointy little crown, pinned neatly to the center of her head.

And the guys _saw_ her in this. They’d never let her live it down.

There’s some kind of massive golden necklace draped over her collarbone and there seem to be some tiny dangly earrings involved, too, but she’s officially had it with this world. She strides toward the bars of her cell with every intention of getting the hell out.

No sooner does she do so, however, than she hears voices coming in her direction and sees shadows moving along the wall. There hadn’t been any guards here the entire time, and she takes a second to mentally berate herself for wasting time being mystified by the damn dress before she darts back onto the stone slab. She lays flat, shuts her eyes, and stays as still as humanly possible. With any luck, these guys will keep talking and tell her something useful.

As the voices move closer to her cell, she hears, “…and they have weapons shaped like serpents that can call spirits of lightning!” The guard sounds young, eager, and innocently excited by what must be his first real assignment.

“I’m still not so sure,” the other guard says. His voice is a little deeper, a little older, but still fairly young; he can’t be much more than 30. Both their voices are close now and Sam cracks one eye open, watching as the two position themselves on either side of the cell. They both appear to be holding long staffs with two prongs on either side of a black sphere.

“Oh, come on!” the younger guard exclaims. “They came through the Ancient Ring! And the legends say that-”

“I know what the legends say,” the older guard grumbles. “I just think this is all a little too convenient. These so-called messiahs appear just as the magistrate’s term is about to conclude? It’s too easy. He might be looking for a way to earn another one, and he must think these people are going to be able give it to him.”

The younger guard scoffs. “The magistrate would do no such thing; he is an honorable man!”

“He would do _exactly_ this sort of thing. He adores his power; can’t you see it in his eyes?”

The younger guard doesn’t respond to that, so the older one continues speaking. “Legendary saviors coming through the Ancient Ring, completing the long-lost ceremony, appeasing the flame god… it’s the perfect way to placate the populace. They’ll love him for this. He’ll probably even get _two_ more terms out of it!”

Flame god? That’s a new one. Sam remembers the magistrate (and his snooty voice) from their initial meeting, and remembers all the hubbub about ceremony this, Ancient Ring that, but she hadn’t heard anything about a flame god. She grimaces inwardly; given the way she’s dressed, they probably want her to marry it.

The younger guard sighs and falls silent for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice echoes against the walls of the cell; he must be facing it. “Even if that were true, this is still supposed to protect our world from all evils, and…” He trails off, making a series of quiet stuttering noises like he’s searching for words, and then finally says, “Well, just _look_ at the princess! I’ve never seen anyone like her, she’s… she’s so beautiful.” God, he almost sounds like he’s getting emotional. He pauses, then adds almost regretfully, “It seems a shame to just… let them go through with the ceremony.”

The older guard seems to notice his current state. “Your face is red.” The younger guard begins stuttering again, and the older one chuckles. “Keep this up, and I’ll tell your wife.”

As the younger guard pleads frantically, “Oh, don’t tell her, please! She’ll have my head!” and the older guard taunts him with more playful threats, Sam decides it’s now or never. She really hates having to resort to this kind of thing (she’d roll her eyes if they weren’t still closed,) but she has to get these two to open the door, if only for a second.

She coughs once, twice, and immediately winces at how overdramatic they sound. Still, it gets the guards’ attention, and their talking stops abruptly. Their light armor shuffles and shifts as they turn to peer at her through the bars, and she sits up slowly, meeting their gaze with what she hopes is something like dazed innocence. If they’re so insistent on calling her a princess, then she might as well play the part.

“Oh…” she softly mutters, the back of her hand traveling to her forehead. “Where am I?”

The guards gape at each other, as if they never expected her to actually wake up while they were there. The older one is the first to regain his senses and he shakes his head momentarily. “Uh, greetings, Princess!” The younger guard gives him a look at the sudden disappearance of his skepticism, and the older one shrugs. “It’s all right,” he continues. “You’re in the castle.”

“And there’s good news!” The younger guard stands up a little straighter and puffs his chest out. “The ceremony preparations have been accelerated. It’s going to occur in just a few hours, so you won’t have to wait much longer.”

Sam stares at them blankly. The older guard takes the opening and speaks again. “I, uh. I know you must be frightened.”

“Ah, yes,” Sam replies, and thinks it was probably a little too quick. She nods as she says, “Absolutely. Frightened. Completely.” A somewhat awkward silence stretches out between all of them, so she tosses in a, “Help?”

“It’s all right,” the older guard reassures her again. “I know the ceremony must seem a little… barbaric. Honestly, I’m not so sure how I feel about it myself, but…”

The young guard picks up where he leaves off. “But the legends say you’ll be fine! And, and your prince will be there with you, and so will your servants.”

“And were anyone to assist you in, say, an escape,” the older guard says with a wince, “surely they would be punished by death.” The younger guard nods beside him. “We have families we need to take care of, you see. So if the ceremony does go forward, then… well, I’m sorry.”

Sam nods again, a little slower this time. The more they talk about this ceremony, the more upset they look. Whatever it is, it can’t be too pleasant.

“Where is… my prince?” she asks somewhat tentatively. “And my servants?” She has a guess as to who they might have classified as the prince, but she certainly doesn’t want to jump to any conclusions.

“Your servants are being held in the cells above us,” the younger guard answers. “But don’t worry; this is all for your own protection.” Oh yeah, Sam’s heard _that_ one before.

“To be honest, though, I’m not sure where they’ve taken the prince,” the older guard muses. “They may have begun to prepare him for the ceremony. As you will eventually be prepared, of course.”

“Of course,” Sam responds. She does her best to inject some excitement into it, but it still comes out rather flat.

The younger guard does that chest-puffing thing again. “You will see your prince and your servants again at the ceremony, so there’s nothing to worry about. We shall keep you company until the appointed time.” He looks so proud; it might be adorable were he not standing directly between Sam and her freedom.

“Oh, well. That’s, um. That’s very nice. Thank you.” Sam clasps her hands together as she rises from the stone slab, offering them a smile as she slowly makes her way toward the bars. “You know what might be even nicer?”

The guard’s eyes widen with child-like awe as she comes closer to them. They shake their heads in response to her question, but stay utterly enraptured by her presence in their almost personal space.

Sam leans in close until her bangs brush against the bars. The guards do the same, not even aware that they’re doing it.

“It would be even nicer,” she half-whispers to them, “if you both kept me company for, oh, I don’t know.” She shrugs innocently. “Some fresh air. It’s awfully stuffy in here. I mean, the little window’s great, but it’s not all that conducive to good air flow.”

The guards give each other uncertain glances, but Sam presses on. “So, what do you say? Let’s go for a walk.”

The younger guard’s brow furrows. “Er, well. That would require… letting you out of here.”

Sam nods. “That… would be the general idea, yes.”

“That would be constituted as escape,” the older guard remarks. “We would die.”

“Escape? Oh. Oh, no, I- I wouldn’t _dream_ of-” She stops. Their faces are blank as blank can be. They’re not buying it.

“We really cannot open this door,” the older guard continues. “It’s best for all us if we don’t open it.”

“Not even for a few minutes?”

“Listen, Princess, you…” The younger guard shifts slightly and looks at the floor. He swallows hard as he looks up again, and Sam swears she sees a teeny tiny bead of sweat working its way down the side of his head. “You became quite violent when you were first brought here. It was… frightening.”

“They told us you had been possessed by an evil spirit attempting to defeat you before the ceremony.” The older guard shrugs helplessly. “We do not wish to see that spirit.”

“Ever again,” the younger guard adds, his eyes widening slightly as if he’s plagued by some horrible, traumatic ghost of a memory.

Sam lets her head drop with a sigh. There’s no use mincing words anymore, and she’s always been better with the direct approach anyway. “Look,” she says, studying their faces with an expression she hopes will make her ever-increasing desire to go home known and appreciated, “I know everyone here thinks we’re destined to somehow save your planet because we came through the ‘Ancient Ring’, but number one: your planet is at peace. I don’t have any idea what we’re saving you from.”

The two men exchange puzzled glances. “Evil,” they say in unison like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Sam sighs again. “Okay. Well, number two: we’re really not that special. See, we’re explorers. We go through the Stargate – that’s what we call the Ancient Ring back on our world – every day. I know the gate is very important to your legends, but it’s also not something that’s unique to your planet.”

On the plus side, the guards’ worlds don’t appear to be flipping upside down with the introduction of this information. On the other hand, they also don’t appear to be totally plugged into her speech. She stares at them intently, hoping to reel them back in. “We’ve been through _hundreds_ of gates. We come from another world, yes, but we’re human, just like you are. We’re not world-savers.” As soon as the words come out of her mouth, she’s struck by the hopeless inaccuracy of her statement and shuts her eyes. “Well, I guess we’ve saved some worlds before. But not-” She gestures to her currently royal attire. “Not like _this._ ”

The guards glance at each other again. “The magistrate has made his declarations clear,” the younger one states.

“And, like it or not, his word is law.”

They observe her with something that looks like regret, like they’re genuinely disappointed that they can’t help her. She licks her lips slowly, thoughtfully, and draws in a measured breath through her teeth. She lets it go all at once in a huge rush of air.

“Okay,” she simply says before she takes a few steps backwards, turns around, and promptly collapses onto the floor.

It takes a moment for the whole thing to sink in for the guards. They stare at her, at each other, and then back again, jaws gradually becoming more and more agape.

“Princess?” the younger one asks. Sam offers no response whatsoever, not even a twitch. “Oh, sweet fires of- is she all right? Can you tell?”

“I…” The older guard shakes his head as if to clear it. “Yes! Yes, of _course_ she’s all right. She was just talking to us!”

“Then why isn’t she moving?”

“I don’t know!”

The younger guard moves toward the big black lock on the bars, but the older one smacks his hand away.

“What in the world do you think you’re doing?!”

“I’m going to check on her! She might be injured!”

“She’s not injured! This is clearly a _ruse_ ; weren’t you listening when she just said she wants to _leave?_ ” The younger guard ignores him, goes for the lock, and promptly gets his hand smacked again. “ _Do not open this door!_ ”

The younger guard’s tone ratchets itself up an octave. “What if she dies?! I’m fairly certain the saviors need to be _alive_ for the ceremony; do you really want to be held responsible for its failure because the princess is dead?!”

There’s a thought that gets the older guard’s blood chilling. The color drains from his face as his imagination runs wild. After a few agonizing moments of self-inflicted mental torture, he shuts his eyes very tightly and grimaces. “All right,” he says. “Just make sure she’s breathing, and then _get back out here._ ” He brings his staff in front of him and readies it, pointing it directly at the spot where Sam lies. He backs out of the way only to let the younger guard venture inside, and plants himself right in the middle of the cell’s new possible exit.

The younger guard approaches Sam with a great deal of caution, circling her for a moment before leaning forward slightly and lightly prodding her arm with one of the prongs of his staff. She doesn’t move. He looks back to the older guard, who rolls his eyes, but urges him on. He steps even closer, kneels down, leans in a little more, and then…

And then Sam grabs the bottom of his staff, wrenches it out of his hands, and bashes him right in the side of the head with it. He goes down as she leaps up, but the older guard gives an aggravated cry of, “Oh, _I told you!_ ” and lets fly with a barrage of the poofing black things, materializing one right after the other from the sphere in the middle of the prongs. Sam dives behind the stone slab and swoons a bit at the return of the rose stench. Wispy pink smoke rapidly fills the cell and she covers her mouth and nose with her hand; there is _no way_ she’s going to let that stuff knock her out _again._

The older guard’s footsteps thump farther into the cell, and Sam knows there can’t be much distance now between her and him, so she picks up the younger guard’s staff again and swings it hard in a large, sweeping motion as she quickly rises from the floor. It clangs against the older guard’s weapon, knocking it out of the way and sending him a little off-balance. Sam doesn’t waste his mere seconds of distraction: she immediately darts toward him, grabs him by the shoulders, and rams her knee into his stomach. His staff drops to the floor with a clatter, and she shoves him out of her way and into the wall as she sprints out the door.

Once she’s out, however, she glances at the open lock on the bars and figures there had to be a key that opened it, so she silently swears and doubles back into the cell. The older guard is totally dazed, too dazed to do anything about her pouncing on the younger guy and patting him down in an effort to locate the keys. Something clinks in his pants pocket, and sure enough, the keys are there. Sam gratefully snatches them up and bounds back outside, prizes firmly in hand. She rests her staff against the wall beside her, pulls the bars closed and clamps the lock shut.

She’s mid-dash in another direction when she hears the faint swish of her train behind her and stops, rolling her eyes and dropping to one knee. Yanking the whole thing toward her, she finds the place just below where it meets the back of the dress and promptly spears a prong of the staff into it. It goes through easily, like a knife through butter, and she quickly saws the train right off without hesitation. She almost leaves it behind, but changes her mind at the last second and wraps it around her wrist.

A quiet, aggravated exhalation leaves her as she stands again, and she glances back into the cell. The guards aren’t moving.

“Sorry,” she mutters, and runs off without another look back.

\---

They’d been looking forward to P4X-777. They really had been. “Lucky sevens,” Colonel O’Neill said brightly, sporting a rather infectious smirk as they all stepped through the wormhole. So where was the point, exactly, that things started to go awry? Was it when they emerged on the other side to a swarm of staffs pointed directly at their stomachs? Or perhaps it was when they were just getting ready to leave and that magistrate spread his arms wide, saying something about a ritual, and oh, would you please be so kind as to participate before you depart?

No, it had to have been, Sam thinks as she hears footsteps and presses her back flat against another wall, the point when she’d done her usual blabbering to some of the villagers about, “This is how the Stargate works,” and, “Wormholes are cool,” and she’d had an utterly captive audience the entire time. And if there’s one thing Sam almost never has when she starts talking science, it’s a captive audience. They didn’t understand a word of what she was saying, and she knew that, and _they_ knew that, and yet they’d listened anyway, eyes wide and astonished as she prattled through the basics. It was kind of nice at first, but then some of the older, gray-haired women started gesturing toward the sky and muttering under their breaths and possibly crying to themselves, and _that_ , Sam decides, is when things got weird. Looking back on it now, she realizes she must’ve done or said something that made them think she was their mystical, sparkly princess of yore. She certainly doesn’t feel very princess-like as she sneaks through this ridiculous maze of a castle that’s apparently a lot bigger on the inside than it originally appeared on the outside. The impossibly long hallways and the even longer sets of stairs are, unfortunately, giving her a lot of time to finally think about what got them here.

The Pyreneans (“Like the dogs?” the colonel had mused) were paranoid. Really, _really_ paranoid. This was understandable, perhaps, since not one single person had come through their gate for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, and they’d gotten quite used to it being their greatest religious icon (otherwise known as, “Their big lawn ornament,” if the colonel’s never ending witticisms were to be taken with anything other than a grain of salt.) So when SG-1 waltzed through their gate, they panicked. Screams were uttered, women and children were hidden, and soldiers poured out of the castle in droves to “greet” them. It took a lot of forced smiling and a lot of Daniel’s usual verbal magic to convince them that they weren’t evil spirits hell bent on leveling their planet.

The magistrate, tall and thin with a hooked nose and a voice like a buzz saw, eventually appeared to call the soldiers off. He was positively hospitable after that, inviting one and all to come and meet their otherworldly visitors. What with the Stargate being in the middle of the village, and the village being situated right outside the castle, there were plenty of people poking their heads out of windows and doors, hoping to catch a glimpse of these strange new guests.

Things grew considerably more relaxed from there: suddenly there was a feast in their honor (otherwise known as the ritual, and hey, rituals involving food couldn’t be _that_ bad) and Jack was muttering through his teeth that, “We should probably quit while we’re ahead,” and Daniel was muttering back, “Well, we definitely don’t want to be rude _now,_ ” and so they stayed, but _only_ for the feast, and then they’d high-tail it home. It was clear that the Pyreneans weren’t likely to have any new or interesting technology since they were planted firmly in the medieval stages of life, and all four of them were far from averse to the idea of cutting their losses on this one.

Sam holds her breath as the shadow of another guard passes by her. When he’s gone, she glances down at the staff still firmly in her grip. They might’ve been wrong about new and interesting technology after all, what with these things having a clear ability to conceal large ammunition in a very small space, but it’s way past the point where anyone would care. And, Sam notes with an inward grumble, she still hasn’t been able to figure out how to make it work. Right now, it’s just a heavy stick, and that really bugs her.

But she digresses. As she peers around a corner, looking both ways before darting down another hallway, she recalls the feast. The magistrate had taken quite an interest in them by that point, and she assumed ( _And you know what they say about assuming,_ she thinks to herself rather bitterly) he was just trying to dispel any remaining concerns his people may have harbored. He asked a lot of questions, but none of them had really been all that personal. In fact, most of them were actually kind of bizarre: “Have you ever slain a rampaging beast?” (“Sure, we’ve done that. Right? We’ve slain some beasts?”) “Have you ever embarked into the clouds?” (“You mean like… flying? Yeah, we’ve done that.”) “Have you ever performed a miracle with your own two hands?” (“Carter blew up a sun once.”)

Of course, Sam sees now that it was a cleverly disguised test, a list of legendary savior criteria. The gleam in the magistrate’s eye as he excused himself temporarily was unmistakable, and not one of them missed it. She and the colonel had a clear view of him as he left and watched him converse with some soldiers a few yards away. He looked back at them, and he did this a lot, his eyes passing over each one of them in measured increments. It was more than suspicious, and it set off every mental alarm bell they had. By the time he returned to their table, they were already out of their seats.

The magistrate only eyed them greedily, an almost ravenous smirk appearing on his face as he snapped his fingers. Soldiers surrounded them again, closing them into a tight circle, and the magistrate declared in full proclamatory volume that “the promised time has come to us all.”

And then Sam got a face full of poofing grenade and somebody fired a zat and the sounds of punching and kicking gradually grew weaker as they were peppered over and over by the rose bombs. That’s the last thing she _clearly_ remembers; ever since the guards mentioned it, she has a vague memory of waking up groggy and kicking somebody in the head, which must have caused them to chuck even more grenades at her, which would explain why she was the only one high as a kite when they’d tried to make their grand escape.

She hears a voice as she rounds the next corner, dropping in and out as it reverberates against the high walls, but clearly… singing?

“When you wish upon a star… makes no difference who you-”

“ _Stop!_ Stop your chanting right now! You are a _prisoner!_ ”

Sam grins and swallows a chuckle. Leave it to Daniel to figure out how to bug the crap out of his guards without even lifting a finger.

“This isn’t chanting,” she hears him say as she creeps closer to his cell. “It’s _singing_. There’s really a big difference.”

“I don’t care! You will cease it immediately!” One of the guards has his back to her, and they’re so focused on Daniel and standing so close to his cell that they don’t have the slightest idea that she’s there. And that’s good, because it gives her enough time to sneak up right behind them, slowly raise her staff, and nail one of the guards right in the back of the head. He drops like a stone, leaving a very stunned guard and an equally stunned Daniel in his wake.

The other guard has himself planted so close to the bars of the cell that he doesn’t realize his staff is right within Daniel’s reach. Daniel jumps on his distraction and lunges forward, threading his arms through the bars and gripping the staff tightly. The guard attempts to wrench it from his grip, but Daniel’s a lot stronger than he gives him credit for, and he growls in frustration as he lets it go and charges at Sam.

This guard’s quite a bit bigger and stronger than the guys stationed at Sam’s cell, and he clearly has a much better idea of what he’s doing as he hurtles his body into her, slamming her hard against the wall. Stars swarm her vision and strong arms clamp around her as the guard drags her toward the cell. Still blinking away spots, she struggles against him, her shoes leaving the floor as she tries to twist herself out of his grip. It slows him down just enough, and she’s able to drive her heel into his boot before breaking free and slamming her fist into his face. He staggers backwards, hands against his nose, and she uses his momentum to steer him toward the wall, which she drives his head into, just in case. The guard finally goes down and Sam descends on his pockets, patting them down until she finds the keys she seeks. At this rate, she’s going to have quite a collection going.

“You all right?” Daniel asks her as she thrusts key after key into the bars’ lock.

“Yeah,” she nods. “Are you?”

Daniel nods back. “Yeah, although I was getting pretty bored there.”

She smirks at him as the lock finally clicks open. “So I heard.”

They take a few cautious glances around as Daniel slides out from behind the bars, and they immediately go about dragging the guards’ limp bodies into the cell. Once it’s closed and locked again, Sam snatches both staffs off the floor, tossing one to Daniel as he comes to stand beside her.

“Do you have any idea where they took Teal’c and Colonel O’Neill?” she asks him.

“Nope. I was sort of hoping you did.”

“Nope.”

They both take one last look inside the cell before breezing out of the room.

As another lengthy hall stretches out before them, Daniel asks, “Still stuck in that getup, huh?”

Sam groans and rolls her eyes. “I have never missed my uniform as much as I do right now.”

\---

The two of them run around aimlessly for God knows how long, and that combined with periodically catching a nauseating whiff of rose starts to get the better of them. They find a small alcove, well-shaded by a row of pillars, in which to momentarily catch their breath.

As they crouch in the shadows, Sam fiddles with her staff, pangs of frustration gradually sinking in. If these stupid guards can fire off a volley without a second thought, why can’t she figure out how to do it? It cannot _possibly_ be rocket science. She’s starting to suspect some kind of weird Pyrenean gene when Daniel, thankfully, interrupts her train of thought that’s well on its way to involving gratuitous use of expletives.

“Do you have any idea what these people expect us to be able to do for them?” he asks.

Sam sighs. “Apparently we have the ability to appease a flame god and banish all evil.”

“Ah. Well, that would make sense.” Sam gives him a skeptical sidelong glance, and he quickly adds, “In terms of language, I mean. ‘Pyrenean’. In this case, it’s probably an extension of the Greek root ‘pyr’.” Sam looks at him again. “Fire,” he confirms.

“Ah,” she says, and turns to her attention back to the staff.

After a moment’s silence, Daniel mutters, “ _Or_ , I guess it could also be for Pyrene.”

“Pyrene?”

“A figure in Greek mythology,” he explains. “Basically, Hercules forced himself upon her in a drunken stupor, she got pregnant and gave birth to a snake, and then she ran into the woods where she poured her heart out to the trees before she was torn to shreds by wild beasts.”

Sam stops what she’s doing and turns her head very, very slowly to stare incredulously at Daniel, whose gaze drifts up to the little crown still perched atop Sam’s head.

“And,” he continues, “she was a princess, so…”

Sam actually feels some of the color drain from her face, and suddenly finds herself uncomfortably aware of her dress.

“So we’ll hope it’s not _that,_ ” she says.

Daniel nods slowly and methodically. “Yeah.”

An odd bang startles them to attention, and they snap up their staffs and press themselves farther into the shadows. The sounds of some sort of commotion reach their ears, and they hear another muffled bang. Voices drift their way, all tense and shouting, but there’s one in particular that they recognize immediately. They don’t even have to look at each other before they hurry out of the alcove.

They cautiously peer around the corner, both relieved and anxious at the sight of Teal’c. He’s surrounded by about five or six different guards, all struggling to wrestle him into submission, and it looks like they might actually succeed. Sam feels Daniel twitch beside her as Teal’c roars in frustration.

Very quickly, she looks behind them. No guards. There aren’t any more leaping into the fray, either, so they might actually have a shot at knocking them all out together. Anything’s better than sitting here watching these guys wail on Teal’c, and when Sam glances at Daniel, he’s already looking to her for an answer to his unspoken question: “Are we just gonna sit here, or are we gonna go help him?” All it takes is one affirmative nod, and they’re off.

One by one, Sam and Daniel manage to peel a few of the guards away, giving Teal’c enough room to clobber the rest of them. They go down quickly, but when the three of them have finally sent the last one careening, Teal’c stumbles. Sam is the first to catch him, sinking down to the floor with him and noticing a spot of red trickling down the side of his head. Daniel comes to his side and latches onto his other arm, and together they guide him back to their alcove.

“Thought this might come in handy,” Sam mutters half to herself as she unwraps the former train from her wrist, tearing off a chunk of the cloth with her teeth. She presses it to the wound on Teal’c’s head, but he grunts in pain and jerks away from her. Daniel tries to hold him steady, tries to reassure him, but his eyes look so unfocused and disoriented and he reeks of rose.

“Teal’c, it’s us, look at me.” Sam presses her palm to the side of his face and he stills somewhat. “Look at me,” she says again, easing the cloth back onto his head. This time he doesn’t resist, and he eventually makes eye contact with her.

“Major Carter,” he mumbles, his voice thick and gravelly. “Daniel Jackson.”

“Yeah, Teal’c, it’s us,” Daniel tells him, positioning him so he can lean against the wall. Sam passes the cloth to him and he takes it, dabbing lightly at some of the red spots.

Teal’c’s eyes regain some of their luster, and he shifts his gaze to Sam, a small smile appearing on his lips. “It appears I did not need to retrieve you after all.”

She grins. “Yeah, we did all right.”

“ _Sam_ did all right,” Daniel corrects her. “I might’ve been stuck singing to guards for the rest of my life if she didn’t break me out.”

Sam tosses a smirk in his direction before turning her attention back to Teal’c. “Are you gonna be all right?” she asks. “How’s your tretonin?”

Teal’c rests the back of his head against the wall and places his hand against Daniel’s arm, gently leading it down and away from him. “I will be fine,” he says, directing it at both of them. “The soldiers merely attempted to incapacitate me with their sedatives.”

“Oh, we know how _that_ goes,” Daniel muses.

“As for my tretonin,” Teal’c continues, “it was taken from me. But as I have said, I will be all right.”

Damn. Teal’c minus tretonin dramatically cuts down their available time, no matter how much he’d try to endure without it. Sam sighs, the wheels in her head turning at full speed as she tries to formulate a plan. “Do you know where they might’ve taken it?”

“Or the rest of our gear?” Daniel asks, not voicing the concern they’re all thinking: even if they manage to make it back to the gate, they’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place without the GDO.

“Or Colonel O’Neill?” Sam finishes.

Teal’c responds exactly the way she thought he would: “I do not.”

Sam sighs again and stands, leaning her back against the wall as she thinks. They have to find Colonel O’Neill, and they have to do it soon. But that had always been true even before now, so nothing about the situation has changed, really. Still, the castle is huge, and the colonel could be anywhere. God knows how many stairs they’d have to climb and how many rooms they’d have to sneak into before they found him. And that assumes they don’t get caught and rose bombed along the way.

She supposes he could already be running around the place trying to get to _them_ , but she has a funny feeling that’s not the case. Daniel and Teal’c still have their uniforms, meaning there’s only one person left to be the prince. He’s probably heavily sedated and heavily guarded, wherever he is. Not like _she’d_ been heavily guarded, but that’s a whole new can of worms she doesn’t have time to open right now.

After a few moments, she notices the silence between them and finds it glaring enough to distract her from her thoughts. When she looks over at Teal’c and Daniel again, they’ve both risen to their feet, standing quietly beside her and, she realizes, patiently waiting. Waiting for her to announce their next move.

Of course. Command automatically defers to her in a situation like this; of course they would be expecting her to make the call. There’s a small part of her that thinks it should be a little intimidating, but it’s not. Not right now, not with them. Implicit trust radiates from both of them, filling her with confidence and a determined fervor.

Sam holds their gazes steadily as she declares, “Let’s go get him.”

\---

“Is it getting hotter?”

Sam wipes the back of her hand against her forehead; she thought she was just getting exhausted. It does, in fact, feel worlds hotter than it felt three or four floors ago. Heat rises, of course, and there are plenty of torches lined along the walls to illuminate the hallways, but this is different. This is hot enough to wonder about, hot enough to sweat. This is _really_ hot.

“It must have something to do with the ceremony,” Sam guesses. She was sort of hoping “flame god” wasn’t going to mean “actual fire”, but it felt like a long shot from the start.

“Major Carter, Daniel Jackson,” Teal’c calls to them. He stands beside a tall set of double doors, his hand pressed lightly against the dark stone. “This door’s temperature is much greater than the others we have recently passed.”

Daniel puts the tips of his fingers on the door and immediately pulls them away with a hiss. “Geez, you’re right.”

Teal’c raises his eyebrow just a bit. “I would not have lied about it.” The smallest hint of a smirk tugs at the corners of his mouth.

Sam lets herself enjoy the moment for a second before placing her hand near the door, stopping just short of actually touching it. It’s radiating heat. Whatever’s in here, it must be important. An odd sense of foreboding creeps up her spine as she nods to Teal’c, who slowly pushes one of the doors open. A burst of hot air rushes out, but thankfully, no open flames snake after it. From what she can see so far, the air inside ripples slightly with the elevated temperature. All three of them glance cautiously around the hallway before slipping into the room, lightly shutting the door behind them.

The place is a veritable sauna, and they find themselves on a sort of balcony high above the rest of the room. Ducking down, they lay their staffs on the floor in front of them as they creep toward the edge, poking their heads up one by one to peer over the side. Sam hears Daniel mutter a faint, “Oh my God,” and it doesn’t take her long to see why.

They’re looking at, among other things, a massive pit of boiling lava right in the center of the room. It has to at least be the size of half a football field, bright orange and bubbling, and it might actually be beautiful if it weren’t a huge vat of scorching liquid in a castle on another world. There are more balconies around the room, making it feel more like an arena than anything else. Only a few people mill about down below, mostly guards, it appears. Some carry things, some don’t, but they all look to be preparing the space. This is obviously where the ceremony is meant to be held, and they all suppress shivers at the sight.

The things that hold their attention the most, however, are the two stone slabs positioned right against the edge of the lava pit. They’re upright when they first see them, but slowly ease back into a horizontal position when a guard, off to the side, pushes a large stone atop a pedestal. He motions for something to be brought over, and Sam’s eyes widen when it comes into view.

Two guards haul a body in the direction of the slabs, and it’s not hard to see whose it is: they’re carrying Jack, limp as a rag in their arms, his feet dragging on the floor as they haul him over. He wears a white suit with golden epaulettes adorning his shoulders – a prince if they ever saw one – and Sam’s heart sinks as they lower him onto one of the slabs, strapping him to it with large metal bars. She’d really been hoping he was just faking it, but he doesn’t spring to life and then it’s too late, and the guards back away, leaving him trapped there.

Now it’s her turn to mutter, “Oh my God.”

Daniel runs a hand over his mouth, still staring wide-eyed at the lava pit. “They’re gonna throw both of you in there.” He’s slightly breathless with disbelief. “And- and I’m assuming _us_ , too,” he says, gesturing to Teal’c, unable to tear his eyes away from the slabs. “That’s the ceremony. That’s how we appease the flame god. We’re _sacrifices._ ”

The three of them continue to stare down below, this simple, yet jarring fact slowly sinking in. These crazy people actually want to off them via molten lava for no reason at all

It’s Teal’c who eventually breaks the silence. “I do not wish to participate in such a ceremony.” It might be funny under any other circumstances. He looks about as disturbed as they’ve ever seen him.

“We have to get him out of there,” Sam says, half to herself and half to them. Daniel and Teal’c retrieve their staffs at the same time she does, and they work their way back toward the doors, keeping themselves low.

They’ve only just reached them when they begin to creak, and with mounting horror, they realize that nobody has a hand on either door. They’re forced to step back as they swing open, and they’re immediately greeted by a horde of staffs pointed directly at their heads. The pack of soldiers has the doorway completely blocked, and there’s nowhere to go.

“Well, well, well.” The voice is unmistakable, and all three of them tense at the realization that they are officially screwed. The group of guards parts in the middle, allowing none other than the magistrate to calmly work his way through. His hands are joined in front him, and the smirk on his face lets them all know just how pleased he is with himself in this moment.

He stops as soon as he’s in front of them, taking his time to study them with silent satisfaction. “Get our weapons,” he snaps, and the soldiers beside him comply without hesitation. Once the staffs are wrenched out of their hands, the guards grab them roughly, and Sam winces slightly as her arms are pinned painfully behind her back.

The magistrate approaches her, chuckling softly to himself. “So,” he begins rather smugly, coming to a stop right inside Sam’s personal space. “It appears the princess wanted to rescue her prince. You know, I seem to remember him trying that with you earlier this evening. It doesn’t seem like he got very far, does it?”

He tosses one last smirk in her direction before he swivels around, announcing, “Cease all preparations immediately. Whatever’s finished is finished. We will begin the ceremony now.”

Sam, Daniel, and Teal’c all toss horrified glances at each other as the soldiers holding them shove them forward, and they start to struggle against them. The magistrate must sense it, because he turns around, his superior expression gone and replaced by a hard glare. “If any of you so much as _twitch_ in the wrong direction, I’ll have you pumped so full of _this_ -” he curls his fingers around the handle of a nearby staff before shaking it slightly, “-that you’ll never wake up.”

For just a second, they hesitate. The guards shove them forward again.

\---

The heat in the ceremony room feels even more unbearable than before. The guards seem just fine, though, and so does the magistrate, and Sam curses their apparently incredible heat resistance as a trickle of sweat makes its way down the side of her forehead. Antarctica really wouldn’t be so bad right now, and _that’s_ saying something.

They stop about halfway to the pit. Sam spies a familiar group of packs out of the corner of her eye near the wall: their gear is all here, and it looks amazingly intact. It’s a shame they can’t just waltz over to it. Jack still lies motionless in front of them on one of the stone slabs, and the other beside him sends a shiver up Sam’s spine. The metal bars hang open and it looks a bit like a giant spider, the space between its claw-like legs gaping and empty, waiting to seize her. She’s jealous, momentarily, of Colonel O’Neill’s unconsciousness. How long does one stay alive having their flesh seared off by boiling lava before it’s all over? She shouldn’t be thinking about it. She _really_ shouldn’t be thinking about it.

The magistrate has his back to them, but he snaps his fingers once, and the guards shove them to their knees. Sam winces; that’s going to hurt in the morning. Which assumes they’ll ever see the morning.

“I knew,” the magistrate begins, turning to face them with an expression that looks something like self-righteous adoration, “the moment you four came through our magnificent Ancient Ring… I knew our legends were finally going to be fulfilled. Destiny has brought you here, you see.”

“If Destiny wanted me to die by flaming pit, I think it would’ve done something about that already,” Daniel quips. The magistrate whirls to face him, glaring harshly.

“ _Silence,_ servant.” He flashes all three of them a malevolent grin. “Your noble sacrifice will be remembered for all eternity. This is the greatest honor anyone can ever have.”

“You mean the greatest honor _you_ can ever have,” Sam says, recalling the young guards’ words from before.

The magistrate’s eyes narrow. “There is no honor for me.” He tries to soak his words with self-pity, but all he accomplishes is narcissism. “I merely carry out the ceremony.”

“A ceremony that’s supposed to protect every single person you hold authority over. There aren’t any perks in that for you?”

The magistrate scoffs. “I… _suppose_ some individuals will think I’ve personally brought them protection and salvation. But there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that. People will believe whatever they want to believe about what happens here tonight.”

Teal’c regards him with nothing short of utter disgust. “And you will let them.”

“I will. I’m in charge of the people’s welfare, after all. They require hope. And _this_ will give them more hope than they’ve ever known.”

God, this guy’s even more deluded than they thought. Sam looks at Daniel and Teal’c, deliberately holding their gazes. _I’m going to try something,_ she thinks. _Sorry if it doesn’t work._ She can only hope they get the message.

“We won’t deny the importance of your legends,” she says. “But we’re _not_ your saviors.” She raises her voice, declaring it for everyone to hear. The magistrate stiffens visibly, while the guards don’t move an inch, and she honestly can’t tell if they’re even listening.

“The Ancient Ring is called a Stargate,” she continues. “It’s one of many. They form a network that spans many planets.” She pauses, watching as the magistrate’s face grows ever redder, and she’s sure it’s not from the heat. “We come from one of those planets.”

“It’s very far away from here,” Daniel jumps in. He glances at Sam and nods slightly. He got the message. “And we go through our Stargate every day to visit worlds like yours, to meet people we don’t know, to learn more about our universe. We’re just explorers.”

“And there are _more_ of us,” Sam adds, “and I’m sure you’ve already guessed that we’re considerably more advanced than you.”

“So help me,” the magistrate growls, “if you do not cease your lies-”

“We are not lying,” Teal’c says. “If you were to kill us, it would be construed as an act of war. Many more would come through your gate. They would decimate you and your people.”

Sam actually feels her guard’s hands tense against her for a fraction of a second. She glances at the other soldiers’ faces, and sees that some of them are looking increasingly fearful.

The magistrate definitely notices. “ _Enough!_ This ends now!” He thrusts a finger at Sam. “Bring the princess to the pit!”

Her guard hauls her up, but his grip on her arms has weakened considerably since this started, and she breaks off, whirling around to smash him in the head. Her hit sends him staggering, but more guards jump on her. She hears Daniel yell her name, and she can feel the guards trying to drag her to the stone slabs.

“We’re not your saviors!” Sam repeats, more to the guards now than to anyone else.

The magistrate’s face is pure scarlet. “Of _course_ you’re not!” he hollers. “Do you think me absolutely vapid?!”

The guards holding Sam stall. A collective murmuring begins behind her.

The magistrate now directs the flames in his eyes toward the soldiers. “Oh, stop standing around, you _idiots!_ Don’t you see what these people mean for all of us?!” He raises his fist in the air, shaking it passionately. “This is our time for glory! Never again will our power be doubted, and we will have that power for the rest of our lives! I’m securing all of our futures!”

The murmuring grows.

“The legends are just that: _legends!_ ” The volume of the magistrate’s tirade increases further. “You’re all smart enough to know that! And anyone who plays a part in completing this ceremony will be rewarded beyond all measure! _You will never know powerlessness again!_ ”

To say that all hell broke loose in that moment would be an incredible understatement. The murmuring erupts into full-tilt yelling, and staffs clatter to the floor at an alarming rate. Sam’s guards can’t seem to decide what they want to do, and half of them pull her forward while the other half drops their hold on her altogether. With considerably less limbs to deal with, Sam begins the arduous task of taking the remaining guards out, the sounds of fighting becoming stronger behind her.

As she struggles against the rest of her guards, she spies the magistrate, his face looking decidedly paler as he takes hesitant steps backwards. He glances behind him at Jack, takes one last look at the melee before him, and then tears toward the pedestal. He rams a fist onto the button, the stone slabs begin to rise from the floor, and Sam’s breath catches in her throat. _No._ It’s the only word she can think, and it starts to repeat itself endlessly in her mind.

She glances behind her; Daniel and Teal’c see it, too, and their expressions mirror hers. The magistrate meets their gazes, his eyes caught somewhere between determination and wicked pleasure. He runs to the slabs, both fully upright with absolutely nothing but lava beneath them. He takes hold of one of the metal bars holding Jack in place and tears it open, and then another, and time stalls so suddenly for all three of them. As they're trapped in this horrible bubble of lagging moments and crawling seconds, the world is about to shatter, and someone has to stop it. Someone has to break free.

It's Sam by a mile. Her vision tunnels as she races forward, the guards behind her distracted by a very sudden surge of strength from Daniel and Teal'c. Somehow, some way, they morph into a wall, two protectors holding this wave of soldiers back with nothing more than the power of their wills. Sam assumes she'll never know how they manage to do it, but as the sounds of the battle behind her fade to a dull hum in her head, she recognizes the force propelling them, the same force planted so firmly in her chest.

She'll never forgive herself if she lets him fall.

The magistrate yelps as she crashes down upon him, hands wound tightly in his robes, ripping him away from Jack's prone form. He's surprisingly quick to shake off his disorientation and doubles back, snarling as he grabs her necklace and pulls it tightly. She gasps hard against it as the distance between herself and Jack grows again, and she's overwhelmed for a fraction of a second by a frigid wave of sheer helplessness. She reaches for him and can't, tries to take a breath and can't, and _God, no, he's slipping,_ and suddenly this is about to be, by far, the worst day Sam has ever known.

An inferno ignites within her and she jerks forward, taking the magistrate with her. He stumbles, leaving his stomach completely exposed, and she drives her elbow into him so hard that it sucks the air from his lungs and leaves him hunching in agony. She swings around immediately, hearing a very clear crunch as her knuckles make contact with his nose and she thinks it might be one of the hardest backhands she's ever given anyone. So fueled is she by boiling adrenaline that she finishes off by kicking him squarely in the chest, and her ruthlessness against this weak, wispy little man with no real fighting skill will disturb her later. In this moment, however, there's not a second she can devote to worrying about it, because this is _not_ going to be her worst day, this lake of lava will _not_ be swallowing anyone, and this fucking scum of a magistrate will _not_ be the one to end their leader's life.

He topples to the floor with a high-pitched whimper, and Sam sprints to the pedestal, slamming her palm onto the stone. The slabs crawl back down, and she thinks there’s no possible way that they could move any slower. She ignores the magistrate’s pained cries below her and heads straight for Jack, holding him in place as best she can. As soon as the stone hits the floor, she begins to rip the metal bars away. Each one cracks loudly as she forces it to give way, so it’s clearly not supposed to work like this and there’s probably a much easier way to get it done. She doesn’t care.

“Sir?” she asks him, her voice sounding oddly frantic in her head. “Sir, can you hear me?” He’s still not moving and beads of sweat dot his face. She places her palm against his forehead and her chest clenches: he’s burning up, and hopes it has more to do with the heat in the room than the number of rose bombs they detonated over him.

As she eases him off of the slab, she feels something bump against her shoe and looks down to find a zat right next to her. For a moment, she swears she’s seeing things, but then she hears two zats spring to life and looks up to see Daniel and Teal’c, their weapons trained on the entire group of guards. She won’t ask how they got to that point, won’t ask how they reclaimed their gear, but her heart soars and she grabs the zat beside her.

The magistrate glances up weakly from his position on the floor as he holds his chest and his stomach, takes one look at Daniel and Teal’c and the guards, and lurches to his feet in an attempt to run for the hills.

 _Oh, I don’t think so,_ Sam thinks, and aims her zat, reveling in the sight of the magistrate stopping in his tracks at the sound of its activation.

“Don’t. Move.”

He whirls around to face her, hand still on his stomach. His legs are shaking slightly, whether from fear or anger, she could care less. She’s just about to ask him (quite politely under the circumstances, she thinks) to get out of the way and let them leave, when he darts away. And for a scrawny son of a bitch, he sure can run.

Sam fires. Electricity ripples through the magistrate’s body and he drops like a stone.

The room is silent, save for the sounds of bubbling lava. Aside from a few nervous glances and fidgets here and there, the guards stay very still.

Sam spares a quick glance down at Jack, limp and unmoving as she holds him with her other arm.

“I want to know the fastest way out of here,” she yells to the guards.

A moment passes, and then one soldier begins to speak. The entire time, his eyes stay focused on the magistrate’s still form, and when he’s finished, the briefest smile flashes across his lips.

\---

The sun is just peeking out over the horizon when they exit into the cool morning air, a welcome blessing after an entire night in heatstroke hell. The sky is alight with soft oranges and blues, but right now, everyone trudging toward the Stargate would much rather be seeing those colors on Earth.

Sam resists grimacing with every step. Her shoulders are killing her, as is her neck and her arms and her legs, and her ankles feel like they’re sawing themselves right off of her body. If she never wears another pair of heels again, there’s a very good chance it might actually be too soon.

She never really let go of the zat as they left, taking up the rear to keep an eye on their six as they descended an atrocious number of lengthy staircases. Now that they’re finally free of the castle walls, the village seems unusually quiet. There’s no rustling of curtains as people peek out the windows, no creaking of doors, and no footsteps except for their own. It’s just as well; if she sees so much as one more person from this godforsaken planet, she honestly feels like she has it in her to scream.

Daniel sets a slow but steady pace for all of them at the front. He looks positively ragged, and an exhausted exhalation is the only sound he makes as they walk. Teal’c marches along behind him, and while he’s in better shape, Sam’s still eager to have that head wound of his checked out. Colonel O’Neill lies motionless on his shoulders, still out cold. It’s more than a little nerve-wracking at this point, and Sam’s eager to have him checked out, too. She tries to tell herself that all things considered, it could be worse, but then decides she’d really rather not think about that at all. They’re intact, and that’s all that matters.

As they arrive at the DHD, they hear a low moan. Sam feels ten weights lift off her shoulders in the span of about two seconds.

“Oh, _geez,_ ” Jack mumbles, his speech only slightly less slurred than Sam’s had been.

Sam exchanges very pleased looks with Daniel and Teal’c. “Hey, sir,” she says, her relief clear in her voice. “How are you feeling?”

Jack grumbles something incomprehensible before replying, “Like I got run over by a semi truck. Twice.” He pauses before asking, “What’s going on?”

“Well, we’re going home.”

There’s a beat of silence. “For real this time?”

Sam chuckles softly. “For real this time.”

He lets his head drop back down with another groan. “Thank _God._ ”

Daniel already looks to be in better spirits as he approaches the DHD and wastes no time dialing home. A hint of a smile lies on Teal’c’s lips as well, and for the first time in 24 hours, things finally feel right again.

Jack grunts and tries to adjust himself, but Teal’c continues to hold him firmly. “Where’s Carter?” Jack finally asks.

“I’m right here, sir,” she responds.

Jack tries to beat a fist against Teal’c’s arm, but it comes out more like a pathetic slap. “Teal’c, c’mon, put me down.”

“I cannot,” is Teal’c’s simple reply. Jack struggles for a few more seconds before surrendering, sighing audibly as his body slackens.

“Carter,” he says.

“Yes, sir, I’m right here,” Sam repeats.

“Isn’t it me who’s supposed to be carrying you?”

She smiles. “No, not today.”

Daniel completes the dialing sequence, and each one of them has never been so glad to see and hear the wormhole spring to life.

“Shall we?” Daniel extends an arm in mock invitation, but they’re all too happy to accept it just the same.

They stride toward the wormhole, and Jack again says, “Carter.”

“Yes, sir?”

He lifts his head ever so slightly, blinking groggily at her. “You’ve still got that thing on your head.”

She blinks. “Oh.” She’s actually a little startled by the realization that her little princess crown is, in fact, still pinned to her head; she could’ve sworn it fell off a long time ago.

As her fingers brush its edges again, Jack adds, “I gotta tell you… it’s freaking me out a little bit.”

Sam can’t help but laugh at that. “You and me both.”

The wormhole slurps as Daniel steps through, and Teal’c and the colonel aren’t far behind. Sam pauses for a moment on the steps, reaching up to remove the pins from her hair and bring the crown down to her eye level. It really is tiny, easily fitting in the palm of her hand. Its bright, polished edges are smudged slightly now with dirt and scratches, but it still catches light beautifully, and Sam can see herself clearly in the reflection.

She turns it over in her hand as she pivots to gaze up at the castle one last time. She stares at one of the thin windows near the top, wondering if maybe, just _maybe_ , the magistrate is watching.

Her eyes sweep over the cobblestones, gauging the distance between the gate and the main door of the castle. It’s a bit of a stretch, but she could probably make it. Without a word, she reaches back and, as hard as she possibly can, flings the crown at the door.

She doesn’t wait to hear it hit the ground before she smirks and lets the wormhole envelop her.


End file.
